Dev4Press has done some interesting work on benchmarking various aspects of WordPress and then testing out some popular questions on page loads etc. The methodologies are well documented and the benchmarking setup is standardized. They are testing three version of WordPress including 2.6.5, 2.7.1 and 2.8 (I wish they would have waited for 2.8.1 to be released). This first set of tests were performed on the WordPress admin interface and other benchmarks will follow. While the quantities are not as important, I think the trends are interesting. Though not independently confirmed, the growing girth of the admin interface is obvious. In contrast, my test WordPress 2.8.1 blog has shown marked improvements in load times and memory usage as compared to WordPress 2.8. It will be interesting to see how the load and memory usage trends of the WordPress admin interface change with future versions as the WordPress team turns their attention towards optimizing the admin panel under the hood. (as Matt has said in many of his State of the Word addresses) via @weblogtooltips
Yeah, it is really too bad that the timing of their interesting and important research corresponded to a dot Oh! As you describe Mark, 8.1 already includes at least one significant performance fix related to the new day light saving calculation code.
Also, of interest is how more operations can be done “in place”, like comment moderation and editing without a page load.
Anyway, very interesting report and a good spur for continued work in this area!
The Updates since 2.65 have added loads of new features and made WordPress powerful but cumbersome, I use GD Press Tools and have Gears installed which does help, maybe the admin interface should make a move to the desktop – AIR app anyone?
I’d love to see their results with/without the Turbo (Gears) feature in use as well.
I have published part 2 of the benchmarking focusing on the blog pages:
http://www.dev4press.com/2009/.....mark-blog/